Reviewed by Ian Lipke
Wanting to expose myself to a piece of modern literature I soon found that much has changed in the many years I have been away. I expected to find different writing styles and degrees of acceptance that differed from my own, but I did not anticipate the raw emotion and the grasp on truth no matter how unpalatable it appeared.
I chose Dead Ends by Samantha Byres and made the acquaintance of the so-called all-round chaos merchant, Nell Jenkins, who had returned to her small hometown to fulfil family duties for the mother and brother she’ s barely seen since making her escape as a teen. But her homecoming is not as she might have anticipated, not when reflection (something incidentally that Nell never does) uncovers her past in Sydney as a string of failed relationships, crappy jobs and an ongoing HR complaint against her ex-girlfriend, now former boss.
Readers soon learn that the obvious, commonsense way forward is not for Nell. She embarks on an affair with Mick, her dead best friend’ s brother, and later Katya, described as the newly arrived and equally unreliable import from New Zealand. This late arrival is working for the once-famous TV psychic Petronella Bush. Without additional information the alert reader will be prepared for Nell to make the wrong decision and fall into Petronella’s psychic web. Readers will soon realize that this is a tale of wrong decision-making. Dead Ends has been described as a portrait of love and loss.
I can find nothing to support a tale of love. Staying with Nell, I see a portrait of a young girl whose love making as she might call it is, in fact, a pursuit of lust. None of the give that distinguishes real love appears. Satisfaction of a bodily need, while it has its place, is not love. Self-respect and self-discipline are completely missing from Nell’s behaviours. That which distinguishes a woman’s behaviour as ‘lady-like’ has no place among Byres’s characters.
A pity to observe we have lost so much.
Dead Ends
(2025)
by Samantha Byres
UQP
ISBN:978-0-7022-6911-0
$34.99;307pp